New Mac Pro for After Effects…

[Darby Edelen]

The only feature that benefits directly from an NVIDIA GPU is the ray-tracing renderer.

I’d recommend not getting too attached to the idea of buying the new Mac Pro until you see impartial performance benchmarks and pricing information. I suspect that this model is going to set a new high mark on Apple’s price/performance wall of shame.

Darby Edelen

[Todd Kopriva]

Darby is correct. Only one feature (GPU acceleration of the ray-traced 3D renderer) requires CUDA. All other GPU features work fine on an AMD GPU.

See this page for details:
https://adobe.ly/UHGwMC

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Walter Soyka]

I’m with Darby. It’s not really worth discussing the Mac Pro until pricing information becomes available. Everyone is talking about a 12-core Mac Pro with dual 6GB GPUs, but I think this will be the top of the line configuration and I think it will be pricey.

I started using PCs a year and a half ago when HP sent me a Z800 to evaluate in cross-platform workflows. I’ve since bought a few more HPs and use them interchangeably with my Macs. PCs offer performance options simply not available on Macs. Please note that these are also pricey!

If your concern is absolute performance, you may want to look beyond the Mac platform. The PC/Mac performance gap will become wider than it’s been in a decade with PCs offering dual-processor Xeon configurations and the Mac Pro tube only offering a single Xeon CPU.

I think the Mac Pro will be a fine computer, and it’s certainly a step up over what’s available today on the Mac platform, but I except it to fall behind high-end PC workstations in absolute performance.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Ridley Walker]

[Walter Soyka] “I started using PCs a year and a half ago when HP sent me a Z800 to evaluate in cross-platform workflows. I’ve since bought a few more HPs and use them interchangeably with my Macs. PCs offer performance options simply not available on Macs. Please note that these are also pricey!
“

Walter, just out of curiosity, what is the configuration of your Z800? How does it score on Geekbench?

[Brandon Cranor]

I haven’t been able to do a bunch of research on it, but I’m sure that if you wanted to make it work with an GeForce card you could get a Thunderbolt PCI box and install it…anyone know for sure?

-Brandon

[Walter Soyka]

[Ridley Walker] “Walter, just out of curiosity, what is the configuration of your Z800? How does it score on Geekbench?”

It’s a Z800 dual-proc 12-core @ 3 GHz with a Quadro 6000. I put in 48 GB of RAM and a PCIe SSD. I don’t know what it scores on Geekbench offhand, but it scores about a 15 on CINEBENCH.

I got the Z800 maybe six months before the Z820 came out, so the machine is no longer a speed champion. I bought a Z620 for travel last January, and it has comparable compute performance to the old Z800 with noticeably lower sticker shock.

I expect to replace the Z800 late this year or early next year. If the Mac Pros were dual processor, I could have used one of them. As it stands, I’ll wait to see what dual-proc configurations are available from HP on the Z820 after Intel releases 12-core Xeons.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Nevin Styre]

thunderbolt2 bandwidth is 20Gbps where as PCIe 3.0 x16 is 128Gbps, there are enclosures to make external video cards work, but the high end cards will definitely be bottlenecked by thunderbolt vs native PCIe. The potentially good news is that the GPUs in this new mac pro are still a card form-factor and not soldered to the logic board like a laptop, theoretically they could be upgraded/swapped out. Though it would still have to be a proprietary mac-pro-tube specific replacement as these aren’t the standard video card form factor, and would involve a little more than a video card replacement today as they would have to be removed from the heat sink and reapplied with thermal compound.

[Walter Soyka]

[Nevin Styre] “thunderbolt2 bandwidth is 20Gbps where as PCIe 3.0 x16 is 128Gbps, there are enclosures to make external video cards work, but the high end cards will definitely be bottlenecked by thunderbolt vs native PCIe.”

I don’t know — it might be fast enough for compute use. Look at how well Resolve performs with a Cubix full of GTXs, all sharing a single PCIe 2.0 16x slot.

It all depends on how much data you need to push on and off the card.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Ridley Walker]

[Walter Soyka] ” it scores about a 15 on CINEBENCH.”

I’m geting awfully close to that on a aging 2010 12 core MacPro with 32GB of RAM.

[John Cuevas]

I only scored a 13 on cinebench. I might be keeping up with the Jones, but I’m behind the Soyka’s

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.